Fresh off a 10-win season and after losing eight players to the NFL, the Rebels are ready to reload and finally enter their names into the college football playoff.
OXFORD, Mississippi — Tuesday, July 29, marked the beginning of fall camp for Ole Miss Football, which is just one year removed from a 10-3 season in which it fell just shy of the College Football Playoffs.
Head Coach Lane Kiffin will have to reload for his Rebels to find themselves in the promised land come December 2026, but he made it clear that the expectation is to be square in the mix.
“That’s the standard we’ve created. That’s the expectation that we have,” Kiffin said. “Twenty-one wins in the last two years, so these players have been talked to a lot about that.”
Out is Jaxson Dart, the three-year Ole Miss starter turned first-round pick of the New York Giants; in is Austin Simmons, the sophomore with the hopes of Oxford on his shoulders. Simmons will have to quickly get on the same page as returning junior wide receiver Caden Lee and a new group of transfer and rookie receivers after three from last year’s stable left for the NFL.
“I feel like it’s just timing. We’ve done a lot of trips together in the offseason, just building timing and chemistry and things like that,” Lee said. “We’ll come out here some nights and throw and get our timing down. I feel like that’s been big for us.”
The junior receiver racked up 57 receptions for 874 yards and two touchdowns in 2024. He enters the year as a Phil Steele preseason third-team All-SEC selection and likely first option.
Kiffin said that he feels like the receiver room could be the strength of the team this season with the additions of De’Zhaun Stribling from Oklahoma State, Harrison Wallace III of Penn State and five-star freshman Cade Cunningham.
“They’ve had a good offseason. They were here in the spring. A lot of those guys have had good careers already; very prolific receivers, so those guys have done a really good job together,” Kiffin said. “I hope I’m not wrong, [but] could very well be the strength of our team.”
In terms of the defense, the reins fall to junior linebacker Suntarine Perkins, who, after an All-SEC third-team 2024 season, is a preseason All-American in 2025. He’ll pair up with linebacker TJ Dottery, who was second on the team in tackles last season (76).
“I definitely feel like we’re underrated,” Perkins said. “We’re a young group of guys. We lost a lot last year, so people are underrating us, but we definitely have a great group of guys who are ready to go to work.”
The Rebels set a program record after the 2024 season when eight players were drafted to the NFL and a number of others were given free agent deals. In 2024, they were the talk of the offseason nationwide and in the SEC for the transfer talent brought in.
There is not quite as much preseason noise in 2025, but Kiffin feels the progress Ole Miss has made in the last couple of years lends itself to the team’s College Football Playoff expectations.
“Before, if you’d have lost a lot of significant players here, you’d be looking at the voting and be at the bottom of the conference,” Kiffin said. “Is it different that you’re not being talked about in the Top 10 in the country? That’s a good place to be for Ole Miss that those questions are coming up now.”
Ole Miss will kick off the season in Oxford and Vaught-Hemingway Stadium August 30, 2025, against Georgia State.